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42


Asymmetric inhibitory treatment effects in multilingual aphasia [Case Report]

Goral, Mira; Naghibolhosseini, Maryam; Conner, Peggy S
Findings from recent psycholinguistic studies of bilingual processing support the hypothesis that both languages of a bilingual are always active and that bilinguals continually engage in processes of language selection. This view aligns with the convergence hypothesis of bilingual language representation. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that when bilinguals perform a task in one language they need to inhibit their other, nontarget language(s) and that stronger inhibition is required when the task is performed in the weaker language than in the stronger one. The study of multilingual individuals who acquire aphasia resulting from a focal brain lesion offers a unique opportunity to test the convergence hypothesis and the inhibition asymmetry. We report on a trilingual person with chronic nonfluent aphasia who at the time of testing demonstrated greater impairment in her first acquired language (Persian) than in her third, later learned language (English). She received treatment in English followed by treatment in Persian. An examination of her connected language production revealed improvement in her grammatical skills in each language following intervention in that language, but decreased grammatical accuracy in English following treatment in Persian. The increased error rate was evident in structures that are used differently in the two languages (e.g., auxiliary verbs). The results support the prediction that greater inhibition is applied to the stronger language than to the weaker language, regardless of their age of acquisition. We interpret the findings as consistent with convergence theories that posit overlapping neuronal representation and simultaneous activation of multiple languages and with proficiency-dependent asymmetric inhibition in multilinguals.
PMCID:3965604
PMID: 24499302
ISSN: 1464-0627
CID: 3630602

Effects of language proficiency and language of the environment on aphasia therapy in a multilingual

Goral, Mira; Rosas, Jason; Conner, Peggy S; Maul, Kristen K; Obler, Loraine K
We examined the relative proficiency of four languages (Spanish, German, French, English) of a multilingual speaker with aphasia, JM. JM's self-rated proficiency was consistent with his naming accuracy for nouns and verbs (The Object and Action Naming Battery, Druks & Masterson, 2000) and with his performance on selected subtests of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis & Libben, 1987). Within and between-language changes were measured following two periods of language treatment, one in a highly-proficient language (Spanish) and one in a less-proficient language (English). The various outcome measures differed in their sensitivity to treatment-associated changes. Cross-language treatment effects were linked to the language of the environment at the time of testing and to relative language proficiency.
PMCID:3505033
PMID: 23185107
ISSN: 0911-6044
CID: 3630582

Integrated narrative analysis in multilingual aphasia: The relationship among narrative structure, grammaticality, and fluency

Altman, Carmit; Goral, Mira; Levy, Erika S.
Background: Amid robust evidence for the efficacy of language treatment in aphasia, equivocal results have been reported for the generalisation of treatment effects to items and tasks not practised during therapy. Moreover, measuring generalisation using functional language production has proven challenging, especially in the context of multilingual aphasia.
ISI:000306607000004
ISSN: 0268-7038
CID: 3630272

A comparison of drill- and communication-based treatment for aphasia

Kempler, Daniel; Goral, Mira
PMCID:3349434
PMID: 22582002
ISSN: 0268-7038
CID: 3630562

Stronger accent following a stroke: the case of a trilingual with aphasia [Case Report]

Levy, Erika S; Goral, Mira; Castelluccio De Diesbach, Catharine; Law, Franzo
This study documents patterns of change in speech production in a multilingual with aphasia following a cerebrovascular accident (CVA). EC, a right-handed Hebrew-English-French trilingual man, had a left fronto-temporo-parietal CVA, after which he reported that his (native) Hebrew accent became stronger in his (second language) English. Recordings of his pre- and post-CVA speech permitted an investigation of changes in his accent. In sentence- and segment-listening tasks, native American English listeners (n = 13 and 15, respectively) judged EC's pre- and post-CVA speech. EC's speech was perceived as more foreign-accented, slow, strained and hesitant, but not less intelligible, post-CVA. Acoustic analysis revealed less coarticulation and longer vowel- and word-durations post-CVA. This case extends knowledge about perceptual and acoustic changes in speech production in multilinguals following CVAs. It is suggested that EC's stronger accent post-CVA may have resulted from damage to the neuronal networks that led to impairment in his other language domains.
PMID: 21591932
ISSN: 1464-5076
CID: 3630532

Age-related differences in idiom production in adulthood

Conner, Peggy S; Hyun, Jungmoon; O'Connor Wells, Barbara; Anema, Inge; Goral, Mira; Monéreau-Merry, Marie-Michelle; Rubino, Daniel; Kuckuk, Raija; Obler, Loraine K
To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated partially correct responses, they were less likely than younger participants to eventually produce the complete target idiom (old: 32%; young: 70%); first-word cues after initial failure to retrieve an idiom resulted in more correct idioms for older (24%) than younger (15%) participants. Correlations between age and idiom correctness were positive for the young group and negative for the older group, suggesting mastery of familiar idioms continues into adulthood. Within each group, scores on the Boston Naming Test correlated with performance on the idiom task. Findings for retrieving idiomatic expressions are thus similar to those for retrieving lexical items.
PMCID:3648420
PMID: 21728830
ISSN: 1464-5076
CID: 3630542

The contribution of set switching and working memory to sentence processing in older adults

Goral, Mira; Clark-Cotton, Manuella; Spiro, Avron; Obler, Loraine K; Verkuilen, Jay; Albert, Martin L
This study evaluates the involvement of switching skills and working-memory capacity in auditory sentence processing in older adults. The authors examined 241 healthy participants, aged 55 to 88 years, who completed four neuropsychological tasks and two sentence-processing tasks. In addition to age and the expected contribution of working memory, switching ability, as measured by the number of perseverative errors on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, emerged as a strong predictor of performance on both sentence-processing tasks. Individuals with both low working-memory spans and more perseverative errors achieved the lowest accuracy scores. These findings are consistent with compensatory accounts of successful performance in older age.
PMCID:3227002
PMID: 22091580
ISSN: 1096-4657
CID: 3630552

Bilateral brain regions associated with naming in older adults

Obler, Loraine K; Rykhlevskaia, Elena; Schnyer, David; Clark-Cotton, Manuella R; Spiro, Avron; Hyun, JungMoon; Kim, Dae-Shik; Goral, Mira; Albert, Martin L
To determine structural brain correlates of naming abilities in older adults, we tested 24 individuals aged 56-79 on two confrontation-naming tests (the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the Action Naming Test (ANT)), then collected from these individuals structural Magnetic-Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data. Overall, several regions showed that greater gray and white matter volume/integrity measures were associated with better task performance. Left peri-Sylvian language regions and their right-hemisphere counterparts, plus left mid-frontal gyrus correlated with accuracy and/or negatively with response time (RT) on the naming tests. Fractional anisotropy maps derived from DTI showed robust positive correlations with ANT accuracy bilaterally in the temporal lobe and in right middle frontal lobe, as well as negative correlations with BNT RT, bilaterally, in the white matter within middle and inferior temporal lobes. We conclude that those older adults with relatively better naming skills can rely on right-hemisphere peri-Sylvian and mid-frontal regions and pathways, in conjunction with left-hemisphere peri-Sylvian and mid-frontal regions, to achieve their success.
PMCID:2975055
PMID: 20399492
ISSN: 1090-2155
CID: 3630512

Frequency and Word-Length Factors and Lexical Retrieval in Sentence Production in Aphasia

Chapter by: Goral, Mira; Levy, Erika; Swann-Sternberg, Tali; Obler, Loraine
in: AOA2010, 48TH ACADEMY OF APHASIA PROCEEDINGS by ; Papagno, C
AMSTERDAM : ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, 2010
pp. 107-?
ISBN: *****************
CID: 3630222

TRAINING VERB PRODUCTION IN COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXT: EVIDENCE FROM A PERSON WITH CHRONIC NON-FLUENT APHASIA

Goral, Mira; Kempler, Daniel
BACKGROUND: The use of constraint-induced treatment in aphasia therapy has yielded promising but mixed results. AIMS: We conducted a treatment study with an individual with chronic non-fluent aphasia. The goal of the treatment was to improve verb production in sentence- and narrative- contexts. METHODS #ENTITYSTARTX00026; PROCEDURES: We administered a modified constraint-induced aphasia treatment in a single-subject design. Treatment emphasized the production of verbs within informative exchanges. Verb production in narratives was assessed before and after the treatment. OUTCOMES #ENTITYSTARTX00026; RESULTS: Results demonstrated a significant increase in the number of verbs produced during narrative generation following treatment. Moreover, a positive change was perceived by naïve listeners who rated the social-communicative impact of the participant's narratives. CONCLUSIONS: The increase in verb production seen in the post-treatment measures is attributed to a combination of the constraints imposed on sentence production during the treatment sessions, the informative nature of the treatment exchanges, and the relative intensity of the treatment schedule.
PMCID:2699270
PMID: 19911035
ISSN: 0268-7038
CID: 3630482